Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re not already acquainted with the amazing sci-fi series Black Mirror—first, what the hell is wrong with you . And second, go watch it right now . And then watch the below trailer for the upcoming, feature-length Christmas special starring none other than Jon Hamm. It looks bizarre, creepy, and absolutely perfect.

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Flying first class is a wonderful experience, but for most it’s simply too expensive. JetBlue’s new premium “Mint” cabin, however, is fresh, accessible and affordable. That’s not all we have on deck, though — read on for the rest of our news highlig…

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Outgoing Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe took the first official step Friday toward pardoning his son for a felony marijuana conviction 11 years ago, a move he’s defended as no different from the second chance he has given other offenders.

The two-term Democratic governor formally announced his intent to pardon his 34-year-old son Kyle, who was convicted in 2003 of marijuana possession with intent to deliver. The move kicks off a 30-day waiting period to receive public feedback on the pardons before final action is taken. Beebe had first announced plans to pardon his son last month. “We take input on any and all cases,” Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said. “I think he knows the details of this case quite well, but again on any case he’s open to new information that comes up during that period.”

The state Parole Board — all of them appointed by Beebe — recommended a pardon for Kyle Beebe in October. Mike Beebe was Arkansas’ attorney general when his son was convicted. Kyle Beebe was sentenced to three years’ supervised probation, $1,150 in fines and court costs and had his driver’s license suspended for six months.

Kyle Beebe applied for the pardon in June, and his application included a letter asking his father for forgiveness, addressing him as “Dear Governor.”

Beebe is leaving office in January due to term limits, and is being succeeded by Republican Asa Hutchinson. Beebe has said his son’s case was similar to many of the more than 700 pardons he’s issued since taking office in 2007, and his announcement said that law enforcement had not objected to his plans to pardon his son.

“I’m not going to treat my son worse than I treat everybody else, and I’m not treating him better,” Beebe said on his call-in show on the Arkansas Educational Television Network last month.

Kyle Beebe’s pardon was among 12 the governor announced Friday, most of them drug-related convictions. All 12 had completed any jail time, fulfilled any parole and probation requirements and paid all fines. Beebe’s office said he denied eight clemency requests and didn’t take action on 11 others.

DeCample said it was possible Beebe may announce his intent to grant more pardons before leaving office on Jan. 13.

“As the files come up the governor wants to continue to work through our backlog, even it means the final decision on some are left to the next administration,” he said.

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Follow Andrew DeMillo on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ademillo

Sometimes childhood experiences motivate a lifetime of extraordinary work. That is certainly true for Georgetown University Law School professor and bioethicist Patricia King, a brilliant scholar and one of the most effective leaders you may not know. She’s spent forty years at Georgetown Law School and has long been involved in higher education leadership. A graduate of Wheaton College in Massachusetts and Harvard Law School, she’s served on both institutions’ governing bodies as a member of the Harvard Corporation and the first woman, first African American, and first alumni to chair the Wheaton College Board of Trustees. Earlier this year she gave the Faculty Convocation Address at Georgetown University and spoke movingly about her “life of learning,” explaining that her passions for education and health that have shaped her professional life—and her perspective—are rooted in her segregated childhood in Norfolk, Virginia in the 1940s and 1950s.

She and her sister were raised by their single mother, and their world mostly revolved around the all-Black neighborhood where they lived in a public housing development. Health care was one of the few needs that occasionally took them out of their community, and the mixed-race clinics where Blacks were clearly treated as second-class patients provided some of her most traumatic childhood experiences with segregation and racism. One of her strongest memories is of the public health facility where her family was required to get regular screenings for tuberculosis. Black patients always had to wait longer, and there was no privacy or separation for Black men and women asked to wait half-dressed in their segregated waiting room. She found this especially humiliating as a pre-teen and experiences like this helped spur her lifelong interest in the intersection of race and health and the inequitable treatment of members of some groups.

They also helped her realize early on that she wanted to get out of the segregated South.  Although she was a strong student and valedictorian of her class, she had no idea how she might be able to make it to college until her senior physics teacher took her under his wing. He brought her the paperwork to register for the SAT and achievement tests needed for college applications, and when she explained she couldn’t afford the test fees — by then her mother was working three jobs just to keep the family afloat — he wrote a check himself and put her in contact with the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, an organization that matched Black students with colleges willing to provide them financial aid. She was accepted to Wheaton, a small women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Her trip to the quiet New England campus was her first time out of Virginia.

Wheaton paved the way for her later success and was also the place where, she said, “I began to understand that real diversity can’t just be cosmetic. Real diversity is about affording all community members the respect and dignity they deserve.” She experienced being encouraged by an adviser to apply for a summer camp job where Black students were hired only as busboys or maids and being required to take train trips to visit Boston museums as part of an art history class — extra expenses not covered by financial aid or her own means. Worst, she said, was how often she was simply made to feel like an outsider, without ever receiving recognition or welcome for having a different perspective.

At Harvard Law School, all of the “micro aggressions” she’d felt in college because of race and class were compounded even more as one of the small minority of women law students. She explained, “Being marginalized in multiple ways was unbelievably hard. Years after I graduated from Harvard, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, another Harvard Law grad, wrote a brilliant article which put a name —intersectionality— on the problem that I experienced. In her article, Professor Crenshaw explains that ‘the intersectional experience may be greater than the sum of racism and sexism.’ Each of us enjoys a mix of privileges and burdens that overlay in complex ways. This truth simply highlights the dedication and nuance with which institutions have to engage with real, deep diversity in order to change.”

Now Patricia King is in positions where she is able to help institutions engage with diversity and make those changes happen. She says that “it takes a lot of effort to understand and appreciate the different perspectives of others,” and ignoring some perspectives is a mistake — especially because “marginalized” people often see the world radically differently than people in power and as a result have new and valuable points of view. “Too often diversity is understood as something that serves only people of color. While access certainly does that, it should do so much more.” She continued, “Greater appreciation of the complexity and splendor of human achievement and experience is important for us all.”

To illustrate this idea, in one of the final points of her Georgetown convocation address she talked about maps. She has chosen to hang a Peters Projection Map of the World outside her office. These maps are known for more accurately portraying the world’s land masses to scale in relation to each other than familiar standard maps, which still “rely on the work of mapmakers of the age when Europe dominated and exploited the world. The maps reflect a bygone era.” On a Peters map, “Russia and Australia are very large, the United States and Western Europe are smaller, and Africa and Latin America are huge . . . A few students want to know why I have the map outside the door. I explain that I like the map very much because it offers a new and more accurate way of seeing the world. It highlights equality and undermines the projection of dominance. The Peters Projection Map, in my view, presents a perspective more appropriate in modern times. They get it!”

But until we all get it and share that vision, and are able to welcome new perspectives like the point of view of a poor Black girl or boy, we are missing out. Patricia King puts it this way: “We have all lost because our work and the work of institutions that we are a part of has not accomplished what it might have, because we are working with old outdated maps and perspectives . . . With a country soon to be majority-minority, this is more important than ever. Our educational institutions, our science and medical establishment, and many of the other institutions in our lives that help define the scope of opportunity for millions must engage in a deliberate, intentional, and informed effort to incorporate the perspectives of people like 12-year-old Patricia King into the core of their work.” Far too many of our nation’s poor children of color are still waiting for us to try to see the world through their eyes — and draw new maps that include and welcome them all.

If the sharply contrasting views of students in Xian or Beijing and Hong Kong are any indication, Deng Xiaoping’s ideal formulation of “one country, two systems” has morphed into another reality: one country, two dreams.

George Chen writes that President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” competes with other narratives in today’s China: the “get rich is glorious” story of Alibaba’s Jack Ma and the democratic aspirations of the Hong Kong students.

In a conversation with students after a lecture in Beijing, Amitai Etzioni detected a surprisingly aggressive patriotism, and even anti-Americanism, in college students he spoke with. WorldPost Senior Editor Kathleen Miles found similar sentiments when she talked with other students in Beijing as well as Xian. In contrast, WorldPost China Correspondent Matt Sheehan observes that the student-led umbrella protests in Hong Kong have become a “defining generational moment,” not unlike the burst of freedom against authority in the 1960s in the West, that will trouble Beijing for a long time to come.

This week, plummeting oil prices are creating geopolitical havoc. Writing from Beirut, former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke argues that more and more energy trade is being denominated in roubles and yuan, undermining the petrodollar that cements the U.S.-Saudi alliance in the Middle East. Elena Ulansky notes what a disaster falling prices are for the Russian economy that is dependent on energy exports. Writing from Moscow, Alexander Golts suggests that “with oil prices falling, corrupt officials see defense spending as their last opportunity to pocket government funds.” Writing from Oman, Alexis Crow notes that Iran’s massive natural gas reserves are a cushion against oil and banking sanctions.

Nobel economist Roger Myerson and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst argue that Ukraine’s voluntary removal of nuclear weapons after the Cold War obliges the West to provide it now with conventional weapons to defend itself against Russian aggression.

Parsing the internal debates in Tehran, Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji argues that Ayatollah Khamenei favors a nuclear deal with the West over the objections of the hardliners who have been his allies. Reporting on a recent visit to the kingdom, CBS News Foreign Correspondent Holly Williams says women are leading a revolution in Saudi Arabia from behind closed doors.

In an interview, Prince Hassan of Jordan scores the recent spate of European parliamentary votes recognizing a Palestinian state as “a gross irrelevance” and says that only a concept of common citizenship can change the Middle East. In this week’s Forgotten Fact, The WorldPost looks at how the state of Palestine was declared long before Europe’s push for recognition. Turning to Israel’s own questions of national identity, Peter Mellgard reports on the divisive stir being caused within Israel and abroad over a legislative proposal to proclaim Israel a “Jewish state.”

Writing from Erbil, UNESCO chief Irina Bokova calls for an end to “cultural cleansing” of historic sites in Iraq and Syria. WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports that the poorly funded U.N. World Food Program is all that stands between Syrian refugees and starvation. She also reports on the migrants crossing the Mediterranean, who are still dying as maritime rescue operations are scaled back.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argues that democracies where citizens are information-rich are the best governed. As Nicolas Berggruen and Darrell Steinberg write, the recent reforms of the initiative system by the Think Long Committee in California have enabled just what Dr. Sen prescribed: “enriching the informational base of democracy and making greater use of interactive public reasoning.” Laura Tyson , the top economic advisor during the years Bill Clinton was president, writes that “the U.S. political system is increasingly dominated by money. This is a clear sign that income inequality in the U.S. has risen to levels that threaten not only the economy’s growth, but also the health of its democracy.” Development economist Aashish Mehta lays out five ways to lessen inequality as jobs disappear.

In a wide-ranging interview, European Parliament President Martin Schulz acknowledges that the European Union has “an image problem,” particularly in the wake of Pope Francis’ speech last week in Strasbourg comparing it to “a barren grandmother.”

Finally, in a photo essay from her visit to the small village of Da Ping, Kathleen Miles documents a way of life that is dwindling as China rapidly urbanizes.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute on Governance and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Senior Editor of the WorldPost. Alex Gardels is the Associate Editor of The WorldPost. Nicholas Sabloff is the Executive International Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s 12 international editions. Eline Gordts is HuffPost’s Senior World Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.